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Solidarity

Many hundreds of organizations, especially in the developing
world, are already beginning to respond to this challenge.  In
particular, many have come forward in support of the commitment
made by their political leaders to achieve basic social goals by
the end of this century.  In some 70 countries, people's
organizations of one kind or another have worked with governments
in drawing up national programmes of action for achieving those
goals.  In many more, voluntary organizations have been holding
their own national consultations on how best to support a
movement towards these targets in the 1990s.

These efforts are just a beginning; and when measured against the
demands of the task in hand they are still only a very weak
beginning.  Not hundreds of organizations but thousands, not
thousands of people but millions, will need to give their support
to this cause if it is to become a matter of national and
international priority.

Unfortunately, a people's movement to meet basic needs, and to
protect children from the sharpest edges of poverty, faces an
even more difficult task than other movements of similar
ambition.  The children of the poorest families are the most
powerless group in any society; their needs translate neither
into voting power nor into purchasing power; and in most cases,
parents in the poorest quarter of the world do not have the
advantages of education, or wealth, or political influence, or
media access.

Such a movement therefore depends, in significant degree, upon
all those people and organizations - including the women's
movements and the environmental movements - that are willing to
act in solidarity with the poorest quarter of the world's people.

The moral basis of that solidarity is obvious.  But unfortunately
it is difficult to keep the need for that solidarity on today's
crowded agenda.  The problems of mass malnutrition, illiteracy
and disease are 'old' problems, problems that have been with us
for so many thousands of years that they have come to be regarded
as part of the fixed architecture of existence.  They therefore
cannot compete in media appeal with the appearance of gaps in the
ozone layer, or with explosions in chemical plants or nuclear
power stations, or with the dramatic possibilities of global
warming.  The news of the technological or strategic advances
which make it possible to overcome some of these problems also
creates very little stir in the media of either the
industrialized or the developing world.  The dust therefore
remains undisturbed on the comfortable belief that only centuries
of economic development can deliver the benefits of modern
science to the poorest quarter of the world's population.

But perhaps the most difficult problem of all is that these worst
aspects of poverty are not newsworthy by the prevailing criteria
of the media in almost all nations.  Unlike even the sudden
disasters of drought or famine or flood, the death of 35,000
children each day from malnutrition and disease is not an event
that happens in one place at one time or from one televisual
cause.  It happens every day, and it happens quietly in poor
communities throughout the developing world.  It is therefore not
'news', and so it slips from the public eye and from the
political agenda.

This does not make the tragedy of those families any the less
real.  The importance of an issue should not be entirely decided
by its novelty or its photogeneity.  There is something amiss
when the world can react with horror and compassion in the face
of sudden disasters, of famines and floods, while remaining
unaware or unmoved by the vastly greater toll of death and
malnutrition taken by ordinary, preventable diseases like
measles, diarrhoea, and pneumonia.  And there is also something
amiss when a passionate cry goes up over the loss of biodiversity
while cold silence greets the unnecessary deaths of so many
thousands of children each day.  It is unacceptable for the
tragedy of these children's lives and deaths to continue when the
means exist to prevent it.  And not to act in solidarity with
their needs, at this time, is to tacitly acquiesce in the verdict
of a world which says that these children do not matter because
they are the children of the poor.

The practical basis for solidarity is equally strong.  If the
basic social goals that have been agreed can be reached, if
children can be protected from the worst aspects of poverty, then
a profound contribution can be made to several of the great
causes that are now of prime concern to the world as a whole. 
Sustainable economic growth, progress towards equality for women,
the protection of the environment, the slowing of population
growth, the achievement of greater equity and political stability
- all of these would be advanced by doing what can now be done to
meet basic human needs and to protect children from the worst
aspects of absolute poverty.

The cause of children and of the poorest families, the cause of
those least able to demand priority for their own rights and
needs, therefore warrants support on both moral and practical
grounds.  And it warrants the support of all those individuals
and organizations, in all countries, that are involved in any and
every aspect of the struggle for a more just and more sustainable
world.

Population

To take the issue of rapid population growth first, Maurice
Strong, Secretary-General of the 1992 United Nations Conference
on Environment and Development, pointed out during the build-up
to the Earth Summit that "the effort to reduce illness and
malnutrition, and to reach the goals of the World Summit for
Children, is crucial not only for its own sake but also as a
means of helping to slow population growth and make possible
environmentally sustainable development in the 21st century and
beyond."  Backing this statement are the hundreds of demographic
studies which show that the four principal factors (fn#31)
involved in the slowing of population growth are: the education
of girls and women; the availability of health services and the
lowering of child death rates; the availability of family
planning services; and increasing incomes.  But probably the most
powerful factor of all is the synergism between these forces;
acting together, they can exert a far greater downward pressure
on birth rates than the sum of their individual effects.  And
even in the absence of one of the factors - significant
improvements in incomes - countries such as China, Sri Lanka, and
the Indian state of Kerala have shown that the reduction of child
deaths, the education of girls, and the availability of family
planning services can together bring birth rates down almost to
the levels of the industrialized world.

These three social factors in the population equation are among
the most prominent of the basic social goals that have been
agreed.  Those goals include a one-third reduction in child
deaths, family planning information and services for all, and a
basic education for all children.  As achieving these goals would
reduce child deaths, so it would give parents the confidence to
have smaller families.  As it would make family planning services
available, so it would give parents the means to have smaller
families.  And as it would bring education to 100 million
children who are now not in school - most of them girls - so it
would make the parents of the future more likely to choose
smaller families.

If ever there was an obvious case for priority action, it is
therefore surely the achievement of these particular goals.  All
of them are important human advances in their own right.  All of
them interact to improve the lives and the health of millions of
women and children.  All of them can be accomplished at
relatively low cost.  All of them give people more choice and
more control over their own lives.  And all of them make a strong
and synergistic contribution to lowering the rate of population
growth and can therefore reduce the gradient of the road to
sustainable development.    

Environment

A movement to meet the basic needs of all children therefore
makes common cause with the need to reduce rates of population
growth.  But it also joins hands with the environmental movement
on other fronts.

From the point of view of millions of the poorest families on
earth, a principal environmental concern is the ever-present
threat of disease in their immediate surroundings.  The greatest
threat to their lives and health is not pollution of water by
chemicals but pollution by foecal organisms, not industrial waste
but human waste, and the greatest of their environmental problems
is the lack of the clean water and safe sanitation which alone
can protect them against diarrhoeal diseases, schistosomiasis,
hookworm, guinea worm, cholera, and typhoid.  This is the silent
environmental crisis; and it takes its daily toll on the life and
health of millions of those whose voice deserves to be heard in
the environmental debate.

Second, reaching the goal of a basic, relevant education for all
children also interlocks with the movement for environmental
protection.  Education and re-education about environmental
issues is the key to saving the planet.  Making people aware of
the facts, of the fragility and unity of ecosystems, of the often
hidden environmental dangers to health, of the real impact of
human activities, of the long-term consequences, of the choices
and alternatives, is and will continue to be the main hope of the
environmental movement.  But without basic education and
literacy, millions of people will be denied such knowledge and
choice; they will be less able to absorb new information, make
informed decisions, and adapt to the many changes that the 21st
century will surely bring.

Finally, the meeting of basic human needs also joins in common
cause with environmental protection because a large proportion of
the world's people cannot reasonably be asked to turn their
attention and their efforts to the question of long-term
sustainability while they are preoccupied with the desperate
struggle for short-term survival and the meeting of their minimum
human needs.

The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development was
the most significant attempt yet made to unite these concerns of
poverty and environmental degradation.  The agreements it came to
are reflected in two major documents - the Rio Declaration on
Environment and Development and 'Agenda 21'.  The Declaration
states that the eradication of poverty is indispensable to
sustainable development.  And Agenda 21 also states, "Specific
major goals for child survival, development and protection were
agreed upon at the World Summit for Children and remain valid
also for Agenda 21."

The women's movement 

Meeting basic needs - especially for primary health care, family
planning and basic education - would also make a fundamental
contribution to the worldwide women's movement.

A central concern of hundreds of millions of women, women who are
for the most part silent partners in that women's movement, is
the survival, health, and normal physical and mental development
of their children.  This concern absorbs the majority of their
time, worry, efforts, and resources.  And there could be few
greater contributions to their lives than the easing of that
task.  Immunization, control of diarrhoeal disease and acute
respiratory infections, vitamin A and iodine supplementation,
safe water and sanitation - all of these could provide practical
support to millions of women who are at present denied this
assistance because it is not a sufficient priority.

If there is a larger contribution that could be made to the lives
of women in the world's poorest communities, then it is the
achievement of another of the basic needs goals - the universal
availability of the information and services to enable people to
plan the number, timing, and spacing of births.

Control over the timing of births is today almost taken for
granted by most women in the industrialized world.  But it is a
revolution yet to come to many millions of women for whom the
benefits would be even greater.

Family planning would save the lives of between a third and a
quarter of the 10,000 women who die every week from the
complications of giving birth.  It could also protect unknown
millions of women from permanent and painful disabilities that
can occur in childbirth and are more common when pregnancy is
unwanted.  And it would certainly reduce the toll of the illegal
abortions, estimated at approximately 50,000 each day, that
result in an estimated 150,000 young women dying each year.

At stake here is not only the quantity of women's deaths but the
quality of women's lives.  By freeing women from the constant
bearing and caring for children, family planning can increase the
time, energy, and resources available for education, for learning
new skills, for income earning, for participation in a wider
range of community activities, and for the rest and leisure
almost totally denied to many millions of women in the poorest
strata of society.

Finally, achieving the goal of basic education and literacy for
all children would strengthen the roots of the worldwide movement
towards equality for women.  Girls are almost universally
discriminated against when it comes to education.  And even from
a purely practical point of view, this is one of the most costly
mistakes that any society can make.  Hundreds of studies in
recent years have shown that the education of girls is strongly
associated with the confidence to adopt new ways; the willingness
to demand and to use health services; the capacity to adapt to
new opportunities and to earn higher incomes; the protection of
local environments; the more efficient use of family resources;
the lowering of child death rates; the improvements of family
health and nutrition; the use of family planning services; and
the reduction of average family size.(fn#32)  

Empowering women with at least basic education and literacy is
therefore one of the most important single elements in the
development process.  But it is also one of the most important
steps towards women gaining more control over their own lives,
more influence over the community and family decisions that
affect those lives, and more opportunity to develop their own
potential.

Political advance

Finally, the growing movement for democracy and for greater
equity can also support - and be supported by - the movement to
overcome the worst aspects of poverty and to meet the basic
social goals that have been agreed.

In particular, education and literacy are the soil in which
democracy and participation flourish and in which greater
equality of economic opportunity becomes a realistic possibility.

Action on many levels, and redress for many wrongs, is needed to
correct the unacceptable degrees of inequality both within and
between nations.  But direct  action to protect the poorest, and
especially children, is fundamental to the process of narrowing
those great inequalities of resources, capacities and
opportunities.   

The cause of overcoming the worst aspects of poverty and reaching
basic social goals therefore strengthens, and is strengthened by,
all of the major causes of our times.  And it is time that these
powerful links found practical expression.  Those at the sharpest
end of the problem of absolute poverty - the poorest quarter of
the world's people - are occupied almost every waking hour of
every working day in the struggle to meet the basic needs of
their families.  They are struggling in a day-to-day practical
sense; and, in many cases, they are struggling in an organized
political sense.  And what they need is the practical and
political support of thousands of individuals and organizations,
in all countries, who are prepared to show solidarity with that
struggle and know enough about its causes and consequences to
recognize the power of common cause.

* * * * *
III

A movement for basic needs


Movements to meet basic needs already exist, in some form, in
almost every country.  There are thousands of organizations in
both industrialized and developing worlds campaigning to promote
education, or to protect children against disease, or to end
hunger in the world, or to promote family planning, or to
encourage breastfeeding, or to combat specific problems such as
iodine deficiency or vitamin A disorders, or to support
immunization and polio eradication, or to promote today's health
knowledge, or to help street children, or to protect children who
are abused at home, at work, or in war.

The great majority of such groups are now located in the
developing world, and their growth has been one of the most
remarkable features of recent years.  "From the middle of the
1970s," says a 1990 report from the OECD, "a trend of growing
importance has been the emergence of indigenous non-governmental
organizations in the South as active partners in development
efforts.  In the 1980s, conservative estimates put their number
at 6,000 to 8,000." (fn#33)

Other sources put the number of independent development
organizations at 12,000 in India alone, including many, such as
the People's Science Movement, that are working specifically to
put today's knowledge and technology at the disposal of the
poorest communities.  In Pakistan, at least 3,000 NGOs are also
working directly with communities to meet obvious human
needs.(fn#34) In Indonesia, there are at least 600 independent
organizations concerned with development issues.  In Mexico,
there are known to be more than 250.  In the Philippines, there
are 200 organizations helping to meet the needs of street
children.

In the industrialized world, also, many hundreds of organizations
are involved in this struggle against the worst aspects of
poverty.  Some focus their efforts on the raising of funds for
practical projects in the developing world.  Some are engaged in
the long-term processes of public education or in campaigning for
political and economic change.  Many are involved in both of
these activities.

Today, NGOs in both industrialized and developing nations are
beginning to mobilize in support of the specific basic needs
goals agreed on at the World Summit for Children.(fn#35)  Such
involvement is specifically invited in the Plan of Action drawn
up at the Summit: "Families, communities, local governments,
NGOs, social, cultural, religious, business, and other
institutions, including the mass media, are encouraged to play an
active role in support of the goals enunciated in this Plan of
Action.  The experience of the 1980s shows that it is only
through the mobilization of all sectors of society, including
those that traditionally did not consider child survival,
protection and development as their major focus, that significant
progress can be achieved in these areas."(fn#36)

As a result, NGOs in about half of the developing countries have
participated in the drawing up of national programmes of action
for reaching the basic humanitarian goals agreed at the World
Summit for Children and endorsed by the United Nations Conference
on Environment and Development.  In some countries - Costa Rica,
the Dominican Republic, Ghana, Jamaica, Malaysia, Niger, the
Philippines, Zimbabwe - NGOs have been officially invited to join
the government commissions charged with drafting national
programmes of action.  In others - Argentina, Bahrain, Benin,
Bolivia, Botswana, India, Kenya, Mauritius, Nepal, Pakistan, the
Sudan, Tanzania, Thailand, Yemen - NGOs have participated by
holding their own national consultations.

In some countries, also, NGOs have decided to devote their
efforts to the achievement of particular goals - either with or
without government cooperation. In Bangladesh, for example, six
organizations - Swanirvar Bangladesh, Village Education Resource
Centre, Dhaka Ahsania Mission, Jagoroni Chakra, the Bangladesh
Literary Society, and the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee
- are working with the Ministry of Education to move towards the
goal of a basic education for every boy and girl by the year
2000.  In Indonesia, the Indonesian Midwives Association is a
driving force behind the 'safe motherhood initiative' which has
brought together many NGOs in an attempt to achieve the Summit
goal of halving maternal mortality rates by the end of the
century.  In Egypt, the Egyptian branch of the International Law
Association and the Society of Medicine and Law mobilized public
support for Egypt to become one of the first countries to ratify
the Convention on the Rights of the Child.  In Brazil, NGOs
working with the country's street children created the National
Street Children's Movement which successfully lobbied for
children's rights to be explicitly recognized in the country's
new constitution.

In the industrialized world, a smaller number of NGOs are
beginning to move in support of these specific goals.  The
Washington-based Results group has generated scores of editorials
in major newspapers in its campaign to support the goals agreed
at the World Summit for Children and to triple the proportion of
United States aid allocated to primary health care and basic
education.  In several countries, organizations such as World
Vision International and the International Save the Children
Alliance have sponsored mass letter-writing campaigns to
political leaders, media representatives, and corporate
executives, to remind them of the basic social goals which were
agreed on at the Summit.

Other NGOs are focusing on particular goals.  The International
Planned Parenthood Federation, to take one of the most important
of all examples, has made and is still making a major
contribution to the goal of making family planning universally
available and to the reduction of maternal mortality.  The
International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
has launched its Child Alive programme to help put into practice
today's low-cost methods of controlling the major childhood
diseases.  Groups such as the International Baby Food Action
Network, the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action, and La
Leche League International, are making an impact on malnutrition
through their campaigns to stop the promotion of commercial
infant formulas in the developing world and by working to empower
all parents with today's knowledge about the advantages of
breastfeeding.  Junior Chamber International, whose members
include young men and women in over 100 countries, has
contributed professional skills to help control the devastating
impact of diarrhoeal disease.  The Christian Children's Fund has
launched a programme to achieve the agreed goals for the half
million children reached by the organization.  Rotary
International, also active in over 100 countries, has raised more
than $300 million in support of polio eradication and mobilized
an army of volunteers to help with the logistics of the
eradication campaign.

This last example should again give pause for thought to those
who might assume that such efforts can only ever be small-scale
gestures which are of no real significance in the larger picture.

In India alone, Rotary International has fielded 50,000
volunteers to help with vaccination efforts and has doubled that
number on national immunization days.  And on WHO's recently
published list of major donors to the Expanded Programme on
Immunization, the sixth name was not the government of an
industrialized nation but Rotary International - whose $300
million contribution exceeds that of the Government of Canada,
Sweden, the United Kingdom, or the United States (fn#37).

In other words, there are already thousands of organizations
which are working in large ways and small, politically and
practically, nationally and locally, towards the achievement of
basic social goals.

But this cannot yet be described as a movement that has
sufficient weight of public and media support, or the sense of
time-related common aims, to begin bringing to bear the sustained
political pressure which is needed.  Only when the climate of
opinion begins to turn, when mass malnutrition, disease, and
illiteracy are widely perceived as unacceptable and shameful,
will today's solutions be put into practice on the same scale as
today's problems.  And to achieve that change, literally millions
of people and thousands of organizations will have to be prepared
to stand up and be counted in support of this cause.